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posted by martyb on Sunday March 10 2019, @08:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the Betteridge-Says:-Reduce,-Reuse,-and-THEN-Recycle dept.

Is This the End of Recycling?

For decades, we were sending the bulk of our recycling to China—tons and tons of it, sent over on ships to be made into goods such as shoes and bags and new plastic products. But last year, the country restricted imports of certain recyclables, including mixed paper—magazines, office paper, junk mail—and most plastics. Waste-management companies across the country are telling towns, cities, and counties that there is no longer a market for their recycling. These municipalities have two choices: pay much higher rates to get rid of recycling, or throw it all away.

Most are choosing the latter. "We are doing our best to be environmentally responsible, but we can't afford it," said Judie Milner, the city manager of Franklin, New Hampshire. Since 2010, Franklin has offered curbside recycling and encouraged residents to put paper, metal, and plastic in their green bins. When the program launched, Franklin could break even on recycling by selling it for $6 a ton. Now, Milner told me, the transfer station is charging the town $125 a ton to recycle, or $68 a ton to incinerate. One-fifth of Franklin's residents live below the poverty line, and the city government didn't want to ask them to pay more to recycle, so all those carefully sorted bottles and cans are being burned. Milner hates knowing that Franklin is releasing toxins into the environment, but there's not much she can do. "Plastic is just not one of the things we have a market for," she said.

The same thing is happening across the country. Broadway, Virginia, had a recycling program for 22 years, but recently suspended it after Waste Management told the town that prices would increase by 63 percent, and then stopped offering recycling pickup as a service. "It almost feels illegal, to throw plastic bottles away," the town manager, Kyle O'Brien, told me.

Without a market for mixed paper, bales of the stuff started to pile up in Blaine County, Idaho; the county eventually stopped collecting it and took the 35 bales it had hoped to recycle to a landfill. The town of Fort Edward, New York, suspended its recycling program in July and admitted it had actually been taking recycling to an incinerator for months. Determined to hold out until the market turns around, the nonprofit Keep Northern Illinois Beautiful has collected 400,000 tons of plastic. But for now, it is piling the bales behind the facility where it collects plastic.


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by FatPhil on Monday March 11 2019, @04:48PM (1 child)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Monday March 11 2019, @04:48PM (#812754) Homepage
    It's infrastructural. The overheads of individual companies doing it do not make sense, even if the idea as a whole does. C.f. roads, railways, air traffic control, ...
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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday March 12 2019, @09:50AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday March 12 2019, @09:50AM (#813149) Homepage
    When faced with actual demonstrable facts (all three countries I know anything about the recycling schemes in all have it as a centralised national infrastructure (plus cooperation with neighbouring countries for obvious reasons)), the only response of the coward is a "Flamebait"? Wow, that's a new low, even for a libertarian. At least Buzz responds with his counter-arguments even if he knows I will disagree with them.
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    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves